What can surprise the asphalt. The road surface, which first made itself known during the construction of St. Isaac's Cathedral. Two square meters were poured with it. The future autobahns could not be discerned from it.
Asphalt is actually a Greek word for mountain tar (the historical name is "Judean tar"), which is a black or black-brown, strongly shining substance, melting at 100 degrees Celsius. The etymology of the word goes back to the salt lake of Palestine, the Dead Sea, which was called asphalt until the mid-19th century. Huge black shiny lumps weighing up to a ton floated up there regularly. Only unlike amber, these are not petrified pine tar, but petrified oil.
There is another explanation for the nickname - according to legend, the baby Moses was found in a basket covered with asphalt. Why not? In the Sumerian "Epic of Gigalmesh," Utnapishtim, the only survivor of the world flood, had his ship covered with a mixture of shark fat and asphalt.
Another point. The mummy, translated from Persian, is also an asphalt. It was used to coat the bodies of the royal dead, before sending them to the realm of Anubis, the god of funeral rites.
Asphalt from the Dead Sea is still the highest quality asphalt available today. It's hard, brittle and contains almost no mineral impurities. And incredibly expensive. The reason is the masterpieces of 17th century Flemish and Dutch painters. By combining asphalt with fast-drying oil and wax, they produced a transparent paint with a beautiful golden brown tone. Paintings by Rembrandt and Frans Hals, Vermeer and Pieter de Hoch were painted in exactly those tones.
"Asphalt paint is made from asphalt and belongs to the oil paints. It is used mainly for glazing because of its beautiful brown color, perfect transparency and ease of application. It is easily mixed with other paints, except for white, and makes them velvety and strong. They have also tried grinding asphalt in alcohol and use it in this form for watercolor painting" - Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary.
In 1880 the artist from Mariupol Arkhip Kuindzhi presented his painting "Moonlit Night on the Dnieper." Astonished Grand Duke Konstantin Romanov (poet K.R.), immediately bought the canvas for the fantastic sum of 5,000 rubles:
"I sort of froze in place. I saw before me an image of a wide river; a full moon illuminates it at a distant distance, thirty versts away. I had that sensation of stepping out onto a lofty hill, from where I could see the majestic river, illuminated by the moon. It takes one's breath away, one cannot tear oneself away from the dazzling, magical picture, one's soul yearns," - the president of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, Konstantin Romanov.
The crowd storming the Nevsky Hall, where the painting was displayed, heard the most incredible rumors about the moon's "glowing" effect. Some claimed that there was a lamp behind it, while others claimed that the cunning painter had used phosphorus and that it was unsafe to be near the painting.
In fact, for the sake of the depth effect, Arkhip Ivanovich used translucent brown asphalt underglaze and also added asphalt to the paints to make the tones deeper. Unfortunately, Konstantin Konstantinovich, unable to part with the painting, took it with him on a voyage around the world - as a result, the landscape faded and darkened under constant exposure to moisture.
To "admire" the artificial asphalt today is enough to go outside. A chance to see the real one is available to visitors to the Mining Museum of St. Petersburg. Here is a collection of both Palestinian and domestic samples of the unique natural phenomenon, which does not compete with the Kaliningrad amber only because of the lack of publicity, but not because of its importance to mankind.
